Whomping
by intothemystic
Summary: AUish. Why the willow whomps. A tale of rage.


AN: This is probably nowhere near canon—I'm not a HP expert by any means—we were asked to write a fanfic on Harry Potter for a creative writing course. We were supposed to write on a 'minor character'. I thought it might be interesting to imagine why a tree would be so violent—so this is the story of the whomping willow, as I imagine it—I realized after I wrote it that there is a bit of a back-story on the tree—so if you know it—try to suspend your disbelief for a moment—and try this on for size—it's a little different from the book. Thanks for reading and reviewing.

**Whomping**

You never meant to kill him. You never intended to become a sentient creature. In the beginning, you were just a cold, dry thing. Inanimate and unable to care. Perhaps symbolic of hope and birth and life, but really, just a small, dried up little thing. Until someone thrust you deep into the dark earth, covered you over and left you there for the living earth to morph you into something more.

Awakening was a terrifying process. To be slung into consciousness only to find yourself dark and cold and silent… For thoughts to form but not be expressed, for yearnings to grow and grow in a tiny unmoving shell, is torture. The struggle upward into the light was painstaking. It took you nearly two years in our time just to extend a tiny tender feeler out of the darkness and into the clean air. It was dark when you first erupted from the close organic tomb but a few hours later, you were ravished by sunlight for the first time in your short life. It was suddenly clear where your yearnings had come from. It was a primal need for this warm, nourishing glow.

For a short while, it seemed like sentience might not be the exquisite torture you had come to believe it was. All around you lay the moist slopes of hilly England. Tiny sedges beginning to unfurl after a winter's sleep. Small delicate creatures scuttling over tiny hillocks of mud and into their burrows to care for their young.

It was an awakening of a different kind. Sentience in the absence of stimulation is a perfect torture. Sentience in the presence of other living things seemed like it might be a gift. Laying your unique vision on colour and beauty for the first time made you feel something we call wonder. Something altogether new to a being in your particular stage of development. The blue of the sky arcing away in every direction, the deep hues of mud in springtime, the rotting leaves of fall, and the industry of moving, agile living things around you were a feast to observe.

There was something else too. Beneath the soil, there had only been the smell of decay. Not a horrifying, rancid decay, just the smell of life returning from whence it came. Here, in the open air, the heaviness of it all was lost, and all that remained was the light scent of new life and only a vague reminder of what comes after wafting on the air.

Your childhood was not what one would hope. For one, it lasted nearly one hundred years. Further, it was a constant cycle of hope followed by disappointment and pain. The spring brought you light, and the revitalizing feeling of the earth's nutrients flowing through your frail, translucent veins. The summer would be filled with months of growth, and tender shoots bursting painfully forth from your outstretched limbs. As it reached its peak, the sun would begin to burn you, bleeding moisture mercilessly from your fragile skin until soon all that you had painfully created was burned and cracking and floating to the ground to join the cycle you had become so familiar with after living in its midst for so long.

Each fall you wept leaves like tears. Soon after the sky would bleed its colour, and the snow would come. Snow came and with it, such exquisite pain. Everything freezing inside of you, crystallizing and fracturing your delicate cells. Your sapling form would be bent and tortured by raging winds from northern parts. Your limbs would fracture, and flail in the storms. And always, you were alone on these barren moors. Soon the sagebrush brought you little company. The tiny insects brought no wonder. They only brought reminders of your uniqueness and the isolation that came with it.

It was nearly four hundred of our years ago that the first wizards were born. They too came forth from the earth, in a similar manner to you. But there was something different in their birth. With it, they broke free of their earthly bonds. No sinuous roots tethered them to the darkness. They crawled out naked, and tender and then began their magic. It coursed within them mixed with blood, and they breathed it forth and brought life into the hill where you had grown.

It wasn't long before the brotherhood of Masons found their role upon these hills, and the first stones of their domain were laid down in the earth with sweat and blood.

A hundred more years saw you tall and strong. Your curves and graceful limbs belied the raging heart that pulsed within. Recalcitrant buds continued to burst out upon you each spring, plague-like and painful. Brief blooms and lace-like leaves would coat you for some brief time, and then despite your wisdom, strength and stature, north winds would return to destroy your newly, painfully crafted verdant work once more. Your painstaking leaf-work so impermanent—a child's chalk-drawing.

But you watched, in silence while your graceful limbs twisted in the wind. You watched these humans, and these wizards build their lives from the cold ground, and then take flight. Soon, there were children. Tiny, beautiful, delicate creatures, so easily freed from the confines of their birth, and so filled with joy. So loved and protected by their parents. So warm in winter.

At first they brought you joy. Their laughter a new song to soothe your tortured, sentient mind. Their bright faces and lively dance amused you for a time. They played in your branches and hid in your shadow, and you became a part of their world. At least, so it seemed for a time. 

Another hundred years went by, and you realized how children grow, and live and die. You start to see the impermanence of these creatures too. So vibrant, and then gone.

In time, the wizards buzzing round your branches, Quiddich, brooms and owls, begin to feel a lot like pain. Like winter and driving wind. Their cries begin to pain you, their laughter jarring you from slumber. And always, there is the grim reminder that these creatures sprung from the soil just like you—but they never failed to break the bonds that held them to the darkness, rooted as you are. 

Despite the light, despite the beauty all around you, the pulse of life and death and growth, the rhythm begins to wear upon you. You begin to feel a pulsing rage at the injustice of your fate. Alive, and growing, seemingly immortal, filled with thoughts, ideas, and sorrow, but rooted to this spot. Given no voice, your only dance at the wind's command. You shimmer with want. You've watched them fly and cry and laugh and hold one another. You've watched them born, and love and hate, all in your shadow. Within such close proximity to your pulsing life. And all completely oblivious to your struggle. How can they not know? How can they not feel the pain and cold that you feel? How can they taunt and torment you? How can they not free you from your unmoving bonds?

The rage that fills you gives some warmth. It sustains you through the winters. It grows each summer when the wizards play on so much soil supported by your ropy roots. It is malignant. It is spreading through every tiny fiber of your tortured being. It is springing forth in twisted blooms, in darkly marred leaves. You trunk is no longer the curved beauty it once was. Knots and burls erupt from every joint and begin to hunch and bend your proud silhouette.

It is in the summer when it first happens. Werewolves bay at a swollen moon, and owls taunt you with their haunting calls and flit amongst your boughs. The rage is there. Its thrum is nearly palpable in the air around you—yet these foolish, soft creatures ignore it. They pass it off as a chill. A draft.

A man stalks out from their mighty stone palace and peers up at the moon. He laughs heavenward and shakes his long hair out in the breeze. 

You hear him call, "I'm coming, night!" He cackles once more and mounts his broom, painfully hewn from your switches and limbs, and suddenly he is aloft. He floats and bobs in the air before you like a teasing toy. Laughing, playing, tumbling, soaring on the breeze. The moon is glinting off his eyes, which look perhaps a little mad. He wings around you crying out with joy. Your rage trebles, your angry pulse pounds in your core. The force inside you erupts and it happens then. Your limbs shudder and twitch. They shiver and stretch, and then, a strong, lithe branch snaps out and strikes the singing gnat that torments you from the sky.

And now, you are still again. Your rage has found a moment of release. You stare impassively at the pale, broken doll that lies on the dank earth at your roots. It is silent and unmoving now, as you are. It is beginning even now to return from whence it came. The eyes are dull, the skin ghostly pale beneath a pregnant moon, and the werewolves have at last fallen silent.

You sigh, and leaves tremble with relief. You moved. You danced. You killed. You never intended to kill him. You never intended to be a sentient being. But the stillness, the vulnerability to all the elements, seemingly for an eternity, has brought you to this place. Your rage is changing you—changing what you are. From tender shoot, to raging beast. Nature's experiment has failed you. Life should not take life. Yet here you stand. Strong, and vital, firmly rooted to this spot, as you have always been. A monstrosity bent out of rage and yearning to be free. No love or beauty, life or death, could stop you from this course of growth.


End file.
